The field of life sciences has experienced dramatic advancement over the last two decades. From the broad commercialization of products that derive from recombinant DNA technology, to the simplification of research, development and diagnostics, enabled by the invention and deployment of critical research tools, such as the polymerase chain reaction, nucleic acid array technologies, robust nucleic acid sequencing technologies, and more recently, the development and commercialization of high throughput next generation sequencing technologies. All of these improvements have combined to advance the fields of biological research, medicine, diagnostics, agricultural biotechnology, and myriad other related fields by leaps and bounds.
Many of these advances in biological analysis and manipulation require complex, multi-step process workflows, as well as multiple highly diverse unit operations, in order to achieve the desired result. Nucleic acid sequencing, for example requires multiple diverse steps in the process workflow (e.g., extraction, purification, amplification, library preparation, etc.) before any sequencing operations are performed. Each workflow process step and unit operation introduces the opportunity for user intervention and its resulting variability, as well as providing opportunities for contamination, adulteration, and other environmental events that can impact the obtaining of accurate data, e.g., sequence information.
The present disclosure describes systems and processes for integrating multiple process workflow steps in a unified system architecture that also integrates simplified sample processing steps.